Blue Marble - July 2008

Thinks it's just China? Well, every major ecosystem type in the eastern US is being degraded by air pollution. That's right: Adirondack forests, Shenandoah streams, Appalachian wetlands, and the Chesapeake Bay, to name a few.

A new report [pdf] is the first to analyze the combined effects of four air pollutants across a broad range of habitat types.

Most studies focus on one pollutant. And why not? Things always look so much better that way.

But the sulfur, nitrogen, mercury, and ground-level ozone that are released into the air from smokestacks, tailpipes, and agricultural operations fall back to Earth sooner or later. Ooops.

And because the eastern U.S. is downwind from gynormous pollution sources, it receives the highest levels of deposited air pollution anywhere in North America.

Researchers at Northwestern University warn that pollution in Beijing is so extreme that it could trigger cardiac arrest and strokes in spectators and athletes.

Advice from the docs:

Stay indoors during traffic rush-hour periods. "Indoor air pollution levels are always much lower than outdoor, so staying inside will limit your exposure," Budinger said. He cautioned that Beijing's definition of mild pollution would be a pollution alert day in the U.S.

So that's all good advice for the millions who will be descending upon Beijing for a few weeks, but what about the people who actually live there?

The American Human Development Project's new report measures the well being of US citizens based on education, health, and income. Unsurprisingly, being an American is much better for some than others.

Of the ten states with the highest median earnings, six are in the Northeast while the rest are just south of there. A whopping 46% of Texas' 29th District (East Houston) never graduated from high school, compared to a drop out rate of only 5% in California's 30th District, which includes Beverly Hills and Malibu.

The report may be telling us what some of usalready know about our abysmal health care system—that we spend more per person than any other nation only to die younger than basically all of Western Europe—but when the life expectancy of residents in Kentucky's Fifth District is 73 years (same as our national average was in 1978), hard numbers are still sobering.

Leave it to LA to find a way to combine efficiency, sex, and eco-street cred. In the city of instant gratification, there's now an easy way to determine if that cute guy at the gym will build a LEED-rated home with you: green speed dating!

Jenean Smith, founder of the Green Speed Dating website, came up with the idea while brainstorming ways to raise money to install solar panels at a rural school in Nicaragua. "One day—I have no idea why—I said, you know what the world really needs? Green speed dating!" She set up an event in Santa Monica, where for $20 participants could spend three minutes on green mini-dates. Eco-conscious Angelenos couldn't get enough. "There's all these green singles' sites that don't have enough people on them, and there's regular speed-dating where you don't know who you're going to meet," says Smith. "People liked that this was a green event for a good cause."

And how did the LA speed-daters evaluate their potential partners' green-ness? By asking what they drove, of course! One lucky guy narrowly escaped having to admit he owned an SUV; another found his bicyling habit made him a little too green for most dates. NPR caught some of the oh-so-awkward car convos; listen yourself here.

Okay, okay, so only in LA would cars be the focus of a green dating event. (To each his own: Portland, OR offers bicycle speed dating.) But the cause is indeed worthy, and word of the site is spreading fast. California readers take note: This could be your summer of green love.

New research shows that Africans and African-Americans bear a gene variant that helps protect them from malaria, but also makes them more vulnerable to HIV infection. The variant increases susceptability to HIV by 40 percent, says the San Francisco Chronicle.

The genetic trait is found in 90 percent of Africans and 60 percent of African-Americans. Thus far, it has protected against malaria by disabling a protein that some strains of malaria use to enter red blood cells. However, that same protein that's disabled in Africans to prevent malaria can actually protect against HIV by soaking up virus cells before they can invade white blood cells. With this sponge-like protein disabled, Africans lose a key pre-infection barrier.

This finding helps explain, in part, the high HIV infection rates among Sub-Saharan Africans and Americans of African descent. On the flipside, there is a genetic variant among people of Northern European heritage that actually makes them immune to HIV infection. Scientists think the mutation was passed down by ancestors who survived the Black Plague. In one test, a man's blood was exposed to 3,000 times the amount of HIV needed to infect a cell, but infection still didn't occur. The HIV virus simply had no gateway of entry.

Both the European and African genetic traits are currently being studied to see if they can shed light on a cure to HIV.